


Next Time On

by elle_stone



Series: Press Play [3]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Established Relationship, M/M, Past Miller/Bryan, Past Relationship(s), Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-23 18:24:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19706956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: Jasper imagines again the hold of Miller's arms around him, late at night, warding off the nightmares that hide in all of the dark places he cannot see, the sense that he is safe only in the narrow space at the edge of Miller's bed. Trying to immerse himself in visions of a peaceful, beautiful Earth. This feels the same. Everything that threatens held at bay, and something else, calm and quiet and gaining in strength, unfurling before them with subtle, persistent urgency.A story of tentative recovery, in four parts.





	Next Time On

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that I chose not to use archive warnings for this fic. There is an implied sexual relationship between two characters, at least one of whom is underage at this point in the canon, but nothing in the fic is explicit.
> 
> This is the third part in a S3 AU in which everything is roughly the same through 3x04, but then Miller and Bryan break up, and Miller and Jasper get together, and the actual events of the season are only sort of there in the background, moving along slower than in canon. One scene in this fic directly references the previous story, but for the most part, the fic should be standalone.

Miller's standing by the window, stretching, reaching to unkink the knot in the back of his neck, when Jasper starts talking about the past again. 

"Do you remember," he's saying, "visitor's day in the Skybox?" His voice seems to drift in from a distance as far as those old prison days themselves. It’s cracking up along the edges: an old voice, long disused. 

Miller considers simply saying no. No, he doesn’t remember the Skybox. He doesn't remember a thing. The small center of truth to this answer he does not give is that remembrance, ultimately, is a choice. And he’s never cared for reminders of the past. What of it? What does it matter? The window is covered with thick gray slats but there's a world out there on the other side, muddy and wet with persistent spring rains, trampled by thick-soled boots, lopsided and grungy and made up of old and half-broken parts, but a world. He'd rather live in it, than not. 

He shrugs instead and turns around, rolling his shoulders back, shaking his arms out in front of him. Perhaps the problem is that he does not move, anymore, in his sleep. He wakes up in the morning tense and, for just a moment, fearful, stuck in the same position in which he fell asleep, stuck in dreams he can no longer remember as the day starts to slide into place. "So you're talking today?" he asks, instead, because Jasper’s question was less important than the cadences of his voice, the breaking of a silence that has long troubled them. 

Jasper's lying on his back now in Miller's bed, with the blanket slung low over his hips and his feet sticking out from underneath it, nearly even with the mattress edge. His hand moves sometimes, tracing the scar on his chest. This is a common habit of his. His eyes, too, flick sometimes to the ceiling, sometimes to the wall, settling only after a long moment and with disconcerting difference on Miller’s face. He shrugs. A taunt. Last night, he was not up for talking. He knocked on the door not twenty minutes after Miller's guard shift ended, and Miller, still in uniform, his feet bare and his steps silent against the cool metal floor, did not ask who was there, but let him in. The ritual is uneven and not quite predictable, but it is theirs. Jasper knows his schedule and he—he knows that Jasper is the ghost that haunts the settlement, an embodiment of memories, a walking scrap of the past that floats among them, waiting, watching. Hard to pin down. Never where one expects him to be. 

This, Miller tells himself, is why he always opens the door. 

He climbs up on the bed again, which is narrow, and not intended for two, and settles with one knee to either side of Jasper's hips. He plants his hands to either side of Jasper's shoulders and looks down at him. No further answer is forthcoming. Last night, wondering how long Jasper had been roaming the halls, if he'd been in the commons, if he'd been drinking, Miller tried to ask questions and got only a shake of the head in reply. Sometimes Jasper is somewhere else, somewhere from which it’s hard to draw him home. This is how Miller ended up biting a bruise low on his neck. He kisses it now, slow, and imagines Jasper's eyes closing, in the same moment that he brings his arms to drape loosely over Miller's shoulders, his fingertips grazing the bare skin of his back. 

"I remember everything about the Skybox," Jasper’s saying. "You know I've always had a really good memory. It's almost photographic." 

"You don't have a photographic memory," Miller answers. He settles his weight down, nose and lips crushed into the curve of space at Jasper's shoulders, opens his mouth for a malformed kiss. 

"Almost, I said. I remember the cells and the little beds cut into the wall." 

"Everyone remembers that." 

Even people who don't want to. 

Last night, last night. Jasper wasn't bringing the Ark with him, then, except in the way that he brings all of the past with him, so tense and keyed up with it all the time—so why, Miller asks himself, does he always let him in? Is it because he likes the way the present feels, when it’s skin against skin, and his desk lamp is throwing outsized shadows up against the walls? 

"I remember the day we were moved into the same cell. You were funny. And you didn't seem afraid of anything, even though you'd been in longer..." He trails off, one hand now on the back of Miller's neck, life and force to his touch at last as he stretches his own neck up. 

Miller hums. 

"Remember not being afraid of anything?" Jasper asks. 

"No." 

He doesn’t, but then, he's never wanted to live without fear. He's chased it instead, that curl of ice in his gut, that pricking uncertainty up the back of his neck, and called it a thrill. How he felt the first time, as a child, he saw his father arrest a man, looking around the corner of the hallway and knowing that he was not seen, only seeing, watching his father tie the zip-tie cuffs around the man's wrists, the bulging muscles in the man’s arms and neck as he struggled against restraint. How he felt the first time he stole. How, walking through the market with a watch in his pocket that was not his, he thought about the zip-tie cuffs and the angle of the man's shoulders; how at the memory, his stomach clenched so tight that he wondered how he could still dare to move. 

"Do you remember visitor's day?" Jasper asks, and Miller startles, a different sort of ice, like suspicion, chilling the heat that had risen to the surface of his skin. He pulls himself up, leaning his weight on his hands, and hovers above Jasper just enough to meet his gaze. His eyes narrow. 

"Why are you thinking about that?" 

The look that meets his is a challenge. Jasper's hands slide down his arms, fingers curling around biceps. He looks both distant and obscenely close, all at once. 

"I don't know," he answers, but he's so adept at lying, and Miller has not learned to read him yet. "Just remembering. My dads came to visit me. And—you know—the Greens did once." His eyes close, just for a moment. When he opens them, he blinks several times, much too fast. "I think they wanted to hear me say it was my fault." 

"Was it?" 

He's not sure why he's asking, why he's encouraging this. In the Skybox, they never talked about their crimes, neither he, nor Jasper, nor anyone. Everyone knew everything; no one admitted to anything. Eventually, after all, their re-hearings would come. 

Jasper shakes his head. "Only in the sense that I wasn't innocent," he says. "I remember we were at tables right next to each other that day and Bryan came to see you." 

Here it is, then, the point to which all of this must have been building. Miller tries to pull away, but Jasper's fingers sink into his flesh like little hooks and hold him still. So he settles, weight shifting between his knees, body shifting over body, and wonders if this is jealousy, or a challenge, or a dare. 

"I don't remember that," he lies. A half-lie. He remembers Bryan's visits, though perhaps not the one that Jasper is thinking of. He remembers stomping down the ache of missing him, then feeling it flare, like a disease, every time they sat across from each other in the narrow visitors' room; he remembers the steel gray of the table and the uncomfortable tilt of the chairs. He remembers holding hands, often without meaning to, drawing toward each other like magnets even when uncertain silences fell. 

"I figured that he must be your boyfriend," Jasper's saying. "I didn't know he was from Farm until Bellamy mentioned it that day in the Rover. I didn't know,” he adds, “that you were still together then, either." 

"Why does it matter—?" 

"You were different around him." His voice rises to cut off Miller's words, and his hands fall away from Miller's arms and curl up over his sides to his back instead, slight subtle movements there like he's relearning the pattern of Miller’s muscles and skin. "Just from what I could see out of the corner of my eye. I didn't want to listen to the Greens too much, that's why I was—" 

"Spying?" 

"Yeah.” He manages a half-smile, admits it easily. “I couldn't hear what you were saying." 

"It doesn't matter." 

"But I could see the look on your face. When you looked at him." 

He sounds almost uncertain, staring up at Miller with unusual softness. Then he shifts against the bedsheets and starts to tug Miller down. Miller lets his weight fall. They're forehead to forehead again, nose bumping against nose, and then Jasper's palm is resting against his cheek and one of them slowly leans in to kiss the other, and Miller's not entirely sure who is who. This conversation was not a challenge, he realizes, or a dare, or an attempt to wound; not cruelty at all, but a confession. 

_I saw something attractive in you_ , Jasper means, _long before the Mountain, or Earth. Something small and meant for someone else. Something left exposed because it could not be hidden in that strange waiting world we lived in then, in those days when we pressed at the seams of the Ark without seeing, not knowing just how fiercely we were about to break free._

* 

Sense memory, always unwelcome, creeps up on him every time he and Bryan are in the same room. They're on opposite ends of the commons, and Miller is thinking about kissing him—not because he wishes he were kissing him, but as if to prove to himself that this remembered intimacy was real. He challenges himself, thinking of the past as if it were a movie of someone else's life, trying to push past those shallow images to the truth: the under-breath sounds in hidden moments; the passion of their first reunion kiss, barely within the Arkadia gates; the innocence of their first touch, holding hands as they walked down the Alpha Station hallways, so young then, thinking that he was brave. 

He spent plenty of nights on the ground, and in the Mountain, playing this same game with himself, and now he has to wonder if it's just habit, or stubbornness, or maybe self-torture, because he doesn't usually like to live in the past like this. But sometimes he catches sight of Bryan's face and doesn't understand why they loved each other, or how. 

Now he's turned the corner to the hallway that passes by the Chancellor's quarters, which is empty but for one person. But for Bryan, who is standing outside Abby Griffin's door with one hand on the wall and his eyes closed. Miller's not on duty and he's not trying to be quiet, just taking a short-cut to the commons, but he stops dead anyway at the unexpected sight. Bryan makes no move. Must not have heard him. But when Miller takes another step forward, Bryan's eyes snap open—an animal abruptly attuned to the crunch of a twig beneath a hunter's heel—and he puts his finger to his lips, and Miller freezes. 

As in all moments of peril, he feels his options narrow down, like a series of dominoes falling away in front of him. What remains standing are: forward, or back. Join or retreat. Bryan is staring at him, his own expression blank, sharing no clues. 

Curiosity wins, though, and Miller walks carefully, silently, to the doorway's edge, until all that remains between them is the door itself, and the tiny little sliver of space between it and the wall. 

Miller is surprised to find the door open, even this much, because it seems an unaccountable security breach. And yet, even that emotion washes smooth in an instant, like trampled sand beneath the surf. Bryan wouldn't be standing here listening if the door were locked: the Chancellor's room is soundproof, and soundproofing on the Ark is no joke. And then, too, security on the Ark sometimes is. He remembers as much: a lot of pageantry and big words, a lot of cracks for the smart, the curious, the nefarious to slip through. 

And here he is, slipping through one now, not because he truly needs to know what is being said beyond the doorway, not because he thinks this moment is worth whatever risk comes with it, but because it is Bryan standing there, in the hallway, listening, inches away. Because it's been a while, too long, since they've been close enough to touch. Because sense memory and habit, those chains he likes to tell himself he's thrown away, always win. He leans his shoulder against the wall and tilts his head just so, and listens, while he watches Bryan and tries to read his silence, as if the listening itself were worth nothing, and all that matters is Bryan and the slight, foreign impressions that the overheard light leaves on his face. 

The Chancellor isn't in her office, Miller hears that right away. Kane's voice is distinctive, even though, hushed and urgent, it does not sound like the confident, neutral, loud tone that once declared Miller guilty, staring at him across the Council table, in the dramatic glow of the Council office light, trying to intimidate him, as if— 

Hard to imagine that version of Kane ever being afraid of anything. Ever chasing that thrill, in that moment turned to nausea in Miller's stomach, as he tried not to fight against the zip ties holding his hands behind his back. 

But he sounds afraid now. 

"We need to go to this meeting," he's saying. Sounds like he's pleading. Miller wonders if it is Abby Griffin he's talking to, after all. "Our situation here... it's a delicate balance. Something you wouldn't understand—" 

Abby understands plenty, though, just exactly as much as Kane does. 

"I've been on the ground as long as you have, Marcus." 

Of course. Pike. Roll of nausea in his gut again, always happens when he hears that voice, like the inevitable crash of waves on the shore. 

He sounds unerringly calm, frustratingly calm, makes Miller wonder what happened to them out there in the snow, what died there. He knows a little about death himself, but it's not the same. He’s still a whole person—wounded in his own way, but he hasn’t been scattering pieces of himself like heavy baggage that he has to leave behind. 

Kane again: "I know that." 

"Then why are you always fighting me? You welcome Farm Station back—and I know you didn't want us—" 

"That is not true—" 

"If the attack on Mount Weather hadn't happened, this would be a different story. And I’m not angry. But we're here now. We're a part of your community. And I am telling you, as their leader—" 

"Abby is our leader." A little grit in Kane’s voice this time. Miller is still watching Bryan's face, the hard set of his jaw, like a soldier at attention. If he'd looked like this on the Ark, Miller never would have fallen for him. 

Yet he's the one with a Guard's uniform slung over his chair back in his quarters. He wouldn't have a leg to stand on, if this were their fight. 

Back on the Ark, they'd do stupid shit together sometimes, low-level shit, not for Guards' eyes, but nothing like what he'd got into on his own, the real serious thievery that landed him in the Skybox at last. Mostly they were just sneaking around. Looking for secret places they could make their own, searching out privacy for roaming hands and flicks of tongue and swallowed low noises in the dark. Later, separated, those were the bits he'd try his hardest to recall, grasping for a past that in the daylight he'd discard, lonely in his tent wondering what lay beyond the wall and how close, but now, what's coming back is how hard it was not to laugh as they pressed their ears to doorway seams or searched out unlocked doors, the bubble of giddy excitement and lust and fear that, because it was innocent, because it knew no harm and meant no harm, he knows he'll never have the chance to feel again. 

He wonders if Bryan is thinking about those old times, too, or if he's thinking about the Ice Nation, the cold and the snow. 

"I never thought I'd see this side of you again," Pike is saying. He sounds almost awed, but there's a condescension, too, to his surprise. _You've taken a step back_ , he might be saying. "So optimistic. You were a realist, Kane." Through the doorway, all Miller can see is a sliver of wall and the corner of a chair, but he can imagine Pike shaking his head. "I would have thought living on the ground would teach you better. You were _right_. We have to be hard. We have to be uncompromising." 

_A few kids with no future broke you down once_ , Miller's thinking. _You're not hard. You're scared and you don't know what to do. That's how it was then, and how it is now._

"We have to give this summit a chance. If we don't—Charles, we won't win another war. And our people are starting to thrive in peace." 

"Our people are on lockdown," Pike spits. He says the word _our_ like a petulant child who does not want to share. "This is not thriving. This is barely survival. I know that that looks like." He pauses, and Miller pictures him looking out the window, at the mud, at the poorly built new structures half-sinking in the earth. "I think you do, too." 

Miller glances across the doorway again, to Bryan, sees that his hands are hard-clenched fists in his pockets and his eyes are closed. His eyeballs seem to flick and shift beneath his eyelids, as if he's reading something there on his own skin. The past, Miller wonders, or the future? An alternate life, a wish? Something he hopes will quell the fear that's building in him, too? 

"Charles. Listen." 

Kane's voice has dropped low, and Miller feels himself leaning in, like a plant toward the sun, trying to hear him. His own heart has jumped into his throat. He's wondering what will happen if they see him, just a sliver of him through the tiny crack in the door, just a hint of movement there out of the corner of their eyes. If he’ll have time to run. He's wondering how Bryan came to be standing here, leaning in closer now, too, his eyes still closed—if he was looking for Kane, or for Pike. 

Knew he'd be here somehow. Knew this conversation was happening. More than Miller's known in a while, because power doesn't mean what it used to mean. 

"Listen." 

A silence, clear enough to hear the unnatural booming of his heart. He imagines Pike inclining his head, a silent assent. 

"You're not wrong." 

_Understatement_. 

"We both know what's happening here. The situation is not stable. But we have the opportunity to... to make something good, something better than what we had on the Ark." 

"We?” Incredulous. A divide cleaving open; another word that doesn’t meant what it used to. “You mean you and Abby Griffin?" 

"All of us. But we cannot let the camp devolve into chaos and we cannot let it erupt into war." 

There's that tone that Miller knows: strident, decisive, though more strangled than he remembers it, way back when. A flight of confidence cut off too soon. Caught and captured. Desperation seeping in. 

Pike's voice, when he speaks, is low too. Miller can hear the slow, measured stride of his footsteps, and for a moment, he is sure they are heading toward the door, and he almost reaches for Bryan's hand, ready to flee. 

"And you would have us surrender? That's your master plan?" 

"There is no surrender because there is no war!" 

This, shouted, and Miller flattens himself back against the wall. He looks to Bryan again, and finds him standing with his hands on his thighs, his gaze on the floor, his body hunched over itself as if caught in the grip of sudden sickness, which Miller understands: he feels it, too. 

"Marcus." Pity in the name. Perhaps a slow, sad shake of the head. "You know that isn't true." 

A weariness creeps, slowly, up Miller's arms and legs, and through his gut. He is tired of fighting. As he told Bryan once, toward the end. He knows the men on the other side of the door are too, knows it's time to make his escape. ("You know," he hears Kane saying, "that this isn't your decision to make," but the words seem to travel a far distance.) For a few moments longer, though, he is still. Bryan, too. They watch each other from either side of the doorway. 

Pike is right, in a way, more than Miller would like to admit. They’re in limbo. And limbo isn't peace. 

* 

He wakes, in the deepest part of the night, to total blackness and a distraught, flailing movement in his bed. 

"Jasper?" 

His own voice croaks around the word, his limbs thick and heavy with sleep he’s not yet shaken. Next to him, Jasper's body rolls all the way over, toward him, like ocean waves to the shore. Miller sits up but there is no light to which his eyes can adjust. He rubs at them with his hands curled into half-fists and tries again. 

"Jasper? Are you awake?" 

Sometimes the nightmares wake him but usually, when that happens, he just lies very still, and doesn't mention the disturbance until morning. Other times, like these, he's trapped in them. They possess his body like malevolent ghosts, and he tosses and rolls beneath the blanket as a barely contained storm. 

When Miller wakes up, he often finds himself wondering if this is what it's like to be lost at sea. 

The bed is anchored, the room is still and quiet, but Jasper and the noise his movements make against the sheets, a rustling, a friction, make Miller think of distant waters and disorienting tempests. He’s in his own room but he is nowhere. He senses nothing, not even his own body, in the blackness of the hours before dawn, nothing in the uncanny darkness except this furious, tragic movement, this chaos, these roiling dark waves. Jasper's foot kicks out against his leg, and yet, Miller feels an unspooling distance ever growing between them, feels like he is listening to Jasper from miles away. Maybe he is not yet awake. Maybe he is himself in a sort of dream. 

"Jasper?" 

Still no answer, so he reaches for the light. 

The first time this happened, not knowing what to do, and unaccountably scared, he thought about the rule against waking sleepwalkers, and wondered if it applied to nightmares too. He wondered if he should find Monty. He pictured himself, even, wandering the ship in his bare feet, knocking on Monty's door in the early a.m., hoping that, because the noise was so unexpected, Monty would answer the door without checking first to see who was there. Hoping that, in a bout of confused forgiveness, or out of character softness, he might even let Miller in. He'd share some best friend wisdom, maybe. He'd want to help Jasper, at least, even if he did not care for Miller himself. 

But in truth, he's pretty sure Monty doesn't know what to do about night terrors. If he did, maybe he and Jasper would still be speaking. 

So he turns on the light by the bed and waits a long moment for his eyes to adjust, and then he reaches for Jasper's shoulder and tugs on him, pulls on him, gently shakes him to try to break through. 

When Jasper does wake, it is with a low, strangled gasp, as if he were breaking to the water’s surface, as if it were still trying to drag him down. He turns his face into Miller’s pillow and squeezes his eyes shut. He curls his hand around the sheet, forming a fist so tight that his knuckles glow white. All of the fury of his nightmares has settled down on top of him now, weighing him down, seeming to press him down. He looks so tense that Miller is afraid to reach for him, as if he might shatter beneath the slightest touch. 

His hand hovers in the air, uncertain. But when he speaks there is conviction to his voice. “Hey. Jasper. Hey, it’s all right.” 

Calling out over the waters to him. Still trying to bring him home. Hand on his shoulder at last, a tentative touch, feeling how he's shaking. The almost-imperceptible tremors of his frame. 

"Hey, you're awake now." 

_Isn't it obvious? Come on, come home. You're awake and you're with me._

Jasper makes a low and unintelligible noise, and his fingers relax their grip for a moment, only to form again into a tighter, stronger fist. 

"It's not real," Miller says, and Jasper answers with a louder, a more accusatory groan. 

Miller pushes at his shoulder, trying to get him to look up. "Whatever it was, even if it felt real, even if it—if it was real once—" Is this his own voice breaking? He's not the one who is supposed to break, ever, because the Mountain, the underground, is far away, and his own dreams are murky, and he never remembers them when he wakes. "Whatever it was, it's gone. You know where you are? You know what's real? You're in my room, in my bed, with _me_." He slides his palm down Jasper's arm, all the way to his hand, settles his hand over Jasper's tight-clenched fingers like they're a block of ice that he is trying to thaw. 

And slowly, something does thaw. 

Jasper lifts himself up, just a little, turns himself onto his back, and opens his eyes. He has to squint up into the lamplight. His gaze flicks back and forth across Miller's face. 

"I know what nightmares are," he says. The words sound cracked, as if he had been screaming, as if he'd lost his voice and is only now slowly regaining the ability to speak. "I know it isn't real." 

Jasper's rolled so completely into his space that Miller barely has room to lie down at the edge of the bed, but he balances there anyway, leaning on one elbow and his hand still covering Jasper's hand. He watches him, his own expression soft. 

"So. Good. It's gone now." 

Jasper shakes his head, a movement so slight that the sound of it, the rustling of his hair against the pillowcase, is more noticeable than the gesture itself. "It's not gone," he murmurs. "It's here in the room. It's something lurking in the darkness. It's everywhere I'm not looking, waiting for me to turn around." 

His words, a rough whisper, fingers climbing slowly up Miller's spine. 

He slips his hand out from under Miller's and grabs at it instead, holds on to him as roughly as, a few moments before, he was gripping the sheet. 

Miller opens his mouth, closes it again. He feels it now, too. He senses it, an unnamable threat like an unnamable ghost, lurking everywhere he cannot possibly see. 

So he does not seek it. He stares at Jasper's face instead, the steady, comforting, familiar features of his face. He watches Jasper watching him, with similar stubborn insistence, acknowledging only him, believing, like a protest, only in him. 

"Do you want to talk about it?" Miller asks. He’s hoping Jasper will say no. He already knows Jasper will say no. 

Jasper shakes his head, his gaze still unblinking. "Can't remember it anyway," he murmurs. "But I can feel it." 

The sharp edge of the word _feel_ , a knife against skin, swift and thin and shallow to draw the slightest line of blood, makes Miller briefly close his eyes. There on the back of his eyelids he remembers the gray halls of the Mountain, the quiet shuffling of their footsteps against the floor, as real in that second as if he were trapped down there again. 

"I don't want to talk," Jasper says, when Miller opens his eyes. "I want you to talk." And he raises his hand, briefly lets his fingers skim against Miller's cheek. 

"Yeah," Miller breathes. "All right." 

He settles down again on the mattress, Jasper shifting over now to give him room, rolling onto his side so his back is to Miller and Miller can curl himself around Jasper's body, close and secure. He fits his knees into the hollow behind Jasper’s knees, wraps his arm around Jasper’s stomach, twines their fingers together. He presses his nose against the back of Jasper’s neck. 

Every movement becomes another slight sound disturbing the quiet, the terrible quiet that will fill itself with monsters, with nightmare hallucinations, with unnamable danger, until he lets the low hum of his voice fill it instead. 

"You know where we are?" he starts. 

"Fucking sunken ship," Jasper answers, and Miller pulls him closer, squeezes him almost hard enough to hurt. 

_Don’t be fucking dumb. I’m trying to tell a story here._

"On Earth, dumbass," he corrects. “And there’s nothing to be scared of anywhere on Earth.” 

“That’s not true—” 

“It is. Think about a clearing in the woods. Like where the dropship landed, but there is no ship. Only the dirt and the trees, and the sky up above you is clear and blue, and there’s a slight wind that moves the leaves in the trees.” 

“And what’s hiding in the trees?” 

“Nothing. Birds. Birds that you can hear talking to each other, and squirrels running over the underbrush. It’s peaceful and safe. And you walk through the trees, over felled trunks covered with moss—they’ve been here a long time.” 

“A long time.” 

“Yeah.” 

He presses closer, his nose in the hollow between Jasper’s shoulder and neck, his lips brushing sometimes against skin. 

“That’s the thing about the Earth, is that it’s been here so much longer than we have, and it doesn’t care at all about the little things we do. See the stream, Jasper? Blue water flowing over rocks, glinting in the sun? Follow it as long as you have to. It keeps going and going but it’s never gone.” 

Perhaps he has fallen asleep. Perhaps he is dreaming and these words in his own voice are a dream, and the soft, tranquil rhythm of Jasper’s breathing is part of the dream, just like his body, and its unexpected hard angles, its unexplainable shifting movements that do not themselves speak of sleep, are details of the dream. Because he seems to hear and feel everything at a remove. He is far from the water’s edge. But when he is sufficiently still and quiet, he can hear the rush and crash of the waves. This time, he does not fear them. 

“Imagine you’re on the shore. You know I’ve always wanted to go to the shore? I don’t know what the ocean looks like when it gets to the beach, but I imagine it’s hypnotic, the waves breaking on the sand and then slipping away. From the Ark we could see the moon and it looked close enough to touch. Now we only see halves of it, slivers of it. Now if we sat on the shore, the waves it controls could wash right over us. Do you think they’re powerful, Jasper? Do you think they’d try to wash us away?” 

* 

Late in the afternoon, not yet evening but the sun has already started to sink, and shadows to lengthen, Jasper climbs the ladder to the top of the east-facing observation deck. This particular lookout post, built behind Alpha Station and with a view of the encroaching forest, through which the path back to the dropship winds, is almost never manned by the Guard. They are too lazy, perhaps. Or stretched too thin. Or too naive in their optimism, buoyed by weeks upon weeks of unprecedented quiet, unprecedented peace, that the Grounders will never approach from this side, that when the enemy does return, they will range themselves grandly but quietly outside the front gate. Not that it matters. The observation deck is still forbidden space, and this, the simple knowledge that he is not allowed to ascend, makes it absolutely tantalizing to him, so tempting that his fingers start to itch even before he grabs the metal rung of the ladder and starts on his way up. The structure creaks beneath his weight, swaying with a light uncertainty that echoes in his stomach, but he keeps going, his feet clanging upon the rungs with each step. 

He expects that when he reaches the top, he'll be alone. 

He's not. 

Monty's leaning out over the top of the barrier, staring out at the grass, the trees, the lazy blue of the darkening sky. He must have heard Jasper coming from quite a way down, but he only turns to look at him when Jasper’s three steps shy of the platform. He pauses then, catching sight of Monty and finding himself, briefly, unable to move. Monty doesn't say anything. Just watches Jasper with the same patient wariness he might turn on an animal unexpectedly appearing out of the brush. 

If they were still friends, Jasper might make a joke, here, partially on himself, about turning around and calling for the Guard, calling for Monty’s arrest. He might make this joke even though they have both had the decidedly unfunny experience of getting arrested for real, have both been frog-marched out of the cafeteria with zip-ties around their wrists, even though Monty probably remembers as well as Jasper does the blunt, stupid terror of it, the disbelieving panic of realizing they were not as smart as they’d thought. He'd make the joke and the sick humor of it would be okay, Monty might even laugh, because the arrest at least was something they shared. Arrested together for a crime committed together, and all of that so long ago, and separated from who and where they are now by an entire world's worth of subsequent events and deeper traumas, that the memory has lost nearly all of its weight, and the last of its ability to frighten. They lived through that, the Skybox, the journey to Earth, and they've been pardoned now and the slate wiped clean and so isn't it funny how, in a way, they are back at the beginning? Both here together again, breaking the rules together again? 

_Isn't it funny how I am pretending to rat you out, when really I would have to also turn on myself, because we are complicit, because even now we are thinking in the same way, we are finding ourselves wanting the same thing at the same time?_

But he does not joke. Not because they are not friends but because of the contours of the spaces between them. Because if he mentioned the Guard, Monty might start thinking about Miller. He might make some low, bitter comment about Jasper's new _boyfriend_ , trying to feel out the truth of the word, even as he bites through it raw with his teeth. And that would be beside the point. That's the last conversation Jasper wants them to be having now. 

And beyond that, too, he knows he cannot joke about arrest or illegality or punishment because he's standing here, three rungs from the top of the ladder, staring at Monty, staring at a real criminal, staring at a person who has done terrible deeds. 

He climbs the rest of the way up, wincing at the hard sound of his shoes against the metal, the way the ladder clangs and frets beneath his weight. 

"Careful," Monty says. His voice is sharp and mean, a different warning to his tone than to his words. "It's not safe to climb up here when you're drunk." 

His own joke. Funny. Jasper holds out his hands, palms down, to prove that he is steady, and says, "Stone cold sober, on my honor." 

He can't quite tell if Monty believes him. What Monty thinks of his _honor_. 

Monty just snorts under his breath and shakes his head, but he turns away too, staring out into the far distance again, like he's embarrassed to have been caught so squarely wrong. 

The truth is that Jasper's trying the sobriety thing, testing it out more days than he used to, trying to sleep through it, trying to live clear-eyed and focused, for maybe the first time in a long time. Monty's judging him like he doesn't enjoy the haze of an altered state himself, like they haven’t been drunk together off of Monty’s signature moonshine, like they haven’t gotten high from plants that Monty grew himself, with the good old Green family green thumb. Like he's so much better for _liking_ it, but not _needing_ it. Jasper leans against the railing next to him and tries to see what he's seeing. Maybe he’s tracing the trail back to the old camp, maybe he’s found something else, something even farther out and more difficult to discern. Jasper's always had a good eye. But all he can see is a minute waving of the treetops, as if in a distant, subtle breeze. 

He came here not just because he is not supposed to be up on the observation deck or because he wanted some time alone, since he could be alone in his room, if nowhere else, but because he wants to try out Miller's Earth-meditation trick and he needs a few visual aids. Maybe he doesn't need that rancid booze from the hangar deck still if he can focus carefully enough, precisely enough, on the scent of the air as the day cools, on the almost-imperceptible movements of the grass below and the treetop leaves above, on the soft-shading blues of the sky. 

"Good," Monty says, also looking out and up, and after such a pause that Jasper almost wonders if, somehow, Monty has found a way to read his mind. "Though if you had a joint on you, I wouldn't say no to a hit." 

Almost the last thing Jasper thought he would say. Now he's not sure if he should laugh or spit or roll his eyes. Or just throw himself over the ledge. "Like I'd offer you one," he answers, low. But the words sound more hollow than cruel. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Monty's arms crossed on the top of the railing, how one hand is curled painfully tight around the opposite arm. Wound up like a corkscrew, Jasper thinks, not quite clear on the meaning of the phrase. Something he read once. But it evokes in him the image of Monty tensed and coiled with violent energy, barely held back from release. 

Monty gives no answer, except for a roll of his eyes and a quiet, dismissive noise, like a hum, under his breath. 

Jasper would like to stomp over to him, rip his hand free of its own grip, force him to loosen his hold around himself. _Stop keeping everything in, stop that shit you always do_. He'd like to order Monty around. He'd like to be the violence in Monty's fingertips, in the tight pressure of his palm; if Monty is inflicting even the slightest pain upon himself, then Jasper wants to feel that pain, wants to _be_ it: not inflict it nor stop it but _embody_ it, _take_ it because it should be his pain, because it’s something he has earned. If he grabbed for Monty's wrists and arms and shook him free, maybe Monty would start yelling again, like he did at the dropship. Like it's so obvious he wants to. He always has to be prodded into emotion, true intense ugly emotion, but fuck it's so much more satisfying to see him furious in his honesty. It's so much easier to be defensive, to be angry in defense, to be yelled at instead of stared at, to be fought instead of coddled. 

But that's not what this moment will be. He feels his own breathing growing ragged, then calming again, not sure if Monty hears the changes as he perceives them in his own lungs: for a few moments burning, then falling into a simple, clear rhythm again. In the quiet, anything is possible. In the quiet, so far above Arkadia that it might feel, to those who've known only the ground, that they are in the sky itself, it's possible that Monty can peer right into his thoughts. 

If he could, he'd know that Jasper was lying, before. He was lying when he said he’d hoard his stash to himself. Really, he knows he'd pass Monty a joint if he had one. The snap, the insult, felt real when he first spat it out but as his own fingers relax and his eyes search out the farthest spot on the horizon's edge, he knows that it would be easier just to fall into old habits, even if he had to reach across the distance between them to do it, even if it’s not like old times. Even if they aren't sitting across from each other, cross-legged and knee-to-knee, heads bowed toward each other, secretive and holding in laughter in their lungs. Let their fingers touch as the joint burns down. Hold the smoke in his mouth as Monty inhales. 

That's what people do, isn't it? Return to old habits? 

Most people. Not thinking. Not dwelling on what has gone. Moving forward along the path of least resistance, doing what is easy. 

Yet here he is, shifting his weight from foot to foot, watching as Monty puts his hands in the pockets of his jacket and wondering who he is and what he's thinking, what exactly he's holding in the tense spots between his shoulder blades or the back of his neck. How has he just _moved on_? And how can Jasper himself move forward except by forgetting, and what is forgetting but pretending he does not know the truth, the worst of who Monty is, the monster he was hiding all along? _My best friend, the murderer. My best friend, a war criminal, guilty of atrocities, destroyer of nations, of the guilty and the innocent and the bystanders all at once._

And now Monty's standing there with his hands in his pockets, staring at the twilight as it eases into the sky, as it shifts the last of the sunlight into grays and bruise-purples and deep blues. 

They spent so much of their childhood dreaming of Earth. Sometimes the planet as it was before the war, diverse with cities and countryside, the world of the books they read and the movies they watched. Sometimes the planet as it they imagined it must be in the aftermath, pristine and abandoned, slowly recovering, slowly recreating itself again. 

Then they arrive, find life, stomp it out. Suffocate it, burn it. 

"Are we supposed to be making small talk or something?" Monty asks, and oh Jasper can taste the bitterness of those words in his own mouth. "Like about the weather?" 

Small talk: something else people do. 

Jasper flicks his gaze up and takes in the cloudless sky. "Maybe. I’m mighty sure it looks like rain." 

He tells himself this is a habit, too, trying to make Monty laugh. Or a protective casing, a barrier around himself: his own version of wrapping his fingers around his forearm and pressing down until it hurts. 

Monty doesn't laugh, though for a moment Jasper thinks he sees a hint of smile there at the corner of his mouth. He's taken a smooth, gray, oval stone out of his pocket and he's twisting it around and around in his hand. "Go—go fuck yourself, Jasper," he says, after a moment. Like he thought the joke itself was a barb, like he thinks Jasper is pushing him away. Like he wants to be pushed away. 

"Float yourself and I'll see you in hell," Jasper answers, one hard bite, and Monty takes the stone and sends it flying over the railing of the observation deck, sailing out across the grass and in the direction of the trees, where it falls in one long, round arc toward the dirt. 

*

He hardly even realizes he is pacing until Miller stops him up short, two hands to his shoulders, twirling him around as he passes by the desk. Miller has been leaning against it, fingers curled around the edge, watching. Now he presses his palms down to hold Jasper steady and waits until Jasper's gaze returns from the far distance, and settles at last on his face. 

"Hey." Steady, familiar voice. He sets his fingertip against Jasper's brow, in the furrowed space just above the ridge of his nose. Taps it lightly. "What's going on in here?" 

_The long arc of the stone, descending in one smooth motion to the ground._

He shoves Miller's hand roughly away. "In here? What about in here?" Presses his own palm to Miller's forehead like he's checking for a fever, like he's reading the full depth of his thoughts, skin to skin, then passes it up over the top of his head and to the back of his neck, grabbing him, holding him, and Miller's hands drop down to Jasper's waist. Jasper dips forward. Their foreheads touching, their noses touching, staring at each other cross-eyed. Jasper's lungs feel like they're burning, down deep but hot, like he's several minutes at rest after a long run. 

"Don't you ever think about it?" he asks. 

"Think about what?" 

This question misses the mark: Jasper would accept any answer, any hint that the past haunts him, that even normal people without scars, without wounds, feel sometimes like a quick zap of energy the sense that what is gone is still here. Even if the memory doesn't hurt. But what he really means is, "The Mountain. Don't you ever think about the Mountain?" 

Miller's hands clench around the fabric of Jasper's shirt, a second of deep tension, of something, perhaps pain, forced down too long and threatening release. Then the moment eases. Jasper's fingers curl beneath the collar of Miller's shirt. 

"I try not to," he answers. Hard to tell from his voice if this is an apology, or a defense. "Most of the time." 

"And you think I should, too—you think I should just forget—" 

"Hey." 

Pulls him closer; Jasper feels body hit against body, and he closes his eyes again, as if he were a delicate thing. 

“I didn't say that. I know it's not an on-off switch. And there's nothing much going for us in the present, anyway—just waiting—" 

His palms are sliding up Jasper's back, slow and with great deliberation, like he's trying to take the measure of him, trying to memorize him by touch. Like he is trying somehow to gather him up, even though they are already so close it’s hard to breathe. Jasper can hear a pained, suffocating hitch in Miller’s lungs. Words trapped in his throat. He wraps his arms around Miller's shoulders and presses one of his own hands flat between Miller's shoulder blades. He can feel Miller's nose bumping up against his cheek. 

"Be here in this moment, at least." His voice is a deep murmur, nothing of the fragility of a whisper to it, but pitched low, as if any louder register might shatter what is fragile, what is not quite formed, between them. “Just be here." 

Be here, be here. As if it were that easy. Jasper wonders vaguely if this is an attempt at romance, and if so how would he even know—but it doesn't matter. Miller's mouth has found his mouth; a broad and open kiss to fall into; the distracting press of warm, wet tongue. For a few moments it is truly easy to forget. The body takes over, the mind buzzes out and blanks, and hands search out anchor, grabbing and hoping to form marks in flesh. He breathes in hot gasps through his nose. 

When he pulls away, the separation is abrupt and without warning. His lungs work hard to catch his breath. He's still holding on to Miller's arms and Miller is staring at him, blinking slowly, dazed. 

Carefully, Jasper untangles their limbs, then takes a shaking step back and falls down into the desk chair, rubs one hand against the back of his neck like he's working out a knot somewhere in the base of his brain. Trying to reconnect his scrambled mind to his shaky, empty body, his limbs that feel hollow and treacherous. When he glances up, he sees that Miller is perched on the edge of the desk again, and he's scrubbing both hands over his face. The movement is too hard, borders on violence. 

"What I don't understand," Jasper tells him, his own voice so much steadier than he'd ever thought it could be, "is why." Each word perfectly and slowly formed, cutting into the silence. Somewhere outside the station, the evening shifts almost to night, and above them, the circadian lights dim. "Why he did it." 

Miller drops his hands and takes a deep breath. After a long moment, he answers, "He did it for you." 

Nonsense. Jasper scoffs at the idea, falls all the way back in the chair, ragdoll-limbed and weak. He feels drained, and would have himself look the part, too. "For me. I wouldn't have asked him—if I'd been in that room, I would have stopped him." 

"But you weren't." Miller crosses his arms against his chest. "You weren't in the room. That's the point." 

"He knew what he was doing. He knew all of them would die, even—" Her name lodges in his throat, hard enough to make him choke. He launches himself forward again, his elbows on his knees. "Clarke, I understand. She hated the Mountain and everyone it. Right from the beginning. And Bellamy would do anything she asked him to. But Monty." His hands clench into fists, and he straightens his fingers again only painfully, grits his teeth as he forces them to uncurl. "It wasn't for me. He just—like he had this idea and he didn't think—" 

"What would you have had them do? Just let us all die? That was the other choice—" 

"That was not the other choice." He snaps out the words, voice too loud. Hands shaking. "I had another plan." 

"That they knew about? That had any chance of working?" 

Miller's eyebrows rise, and he waits, a pocket of silence forming, widening, deepening. When Jasper doesn't answer, he goes on: 

"Bellamy told me about the control room. They had video feeds coming in from all over the Mountain, including the dorms and level five. They saw that everyone else had been captured, including Maya and Octavia." He gestures, a short motion, to where Jasper is still sitting, statue-still. "And you." 

"I wasn't really captured," he murmurs. 

And Miller's voice, sharp: "You looked pretty captured to me. I saw that guard bring you in, handcuffed, and I thought we were pretty much fucked." 

Only four months ago, a space measurable in weeks, in days, but the memory of that time was jarred with shock and fear and panic even as it formed, and never imprinted properly, so that now when he tries to recover it, what he believed to be fire-seared and perfect seems only hazy, like a dream ill-captured upon waking. Later, holding Maya as her face and hands boiled and scarred, feeling the weight of her on his legs, recognizing that her shallow, staggered breaths were her last but still not ready for the final stillness of her body, nothing left in it, nothing left of her but the heavy weight leaning against him, closer and closer to rotting: that he remembers. Holding a dead body in his arms. Nothing on the Ark, where death left no trace, nor even at the dropship camp, had prepared him for those moments, and no stretch of time nor distance will ever erase them, may not even manage to turn them dull. 

But he's let the before and the after become confused. Her death sharp and corrosive, but the hours before a scrambled anarchy of impressions, half-formed plans and futile convictions, the pound-pound-pound of his heartbeat lending structure to the dark. He'd believed it all to be so clear. What clarity might he have seen from the control room, there beyond the fray, the seat of the generals looking out upon the battlefield, taking in the rest of them as tiny figures blinded and scrabbling in the muck. How obvious the answer must have been. How tempting to wipe out the threat with such efficiency, the threat and any dregs of threat, the threat and any last reminders of the war. 

"We were," he answers, dully. "Pretty much fucked." 

"Yeah." 

Miller sounds, in an odd way, like he's giving in. Like he's sorry. Jasper hears him crossing the narrow space between them, and then, inexplicably, kneeling down on the floor at Jasper’s feet. He crosses his arms on Jasper's knees. 

"Knowing Monty, he probably would have done it anyway,” he says, “just knowing we were fucked." 

Jasper wants to tell him, _but you don't know him, not really_ , but he can't find it in himself to argue. Because he does know Monty, and he knows Miller is right. 

"Just out of necessity," Miller's saying. "But it wasn't an adrenaline situation. Not like battle. He would have needed courage, too. That's what I meant when I said he did it for you. He must have seen you handcuffed and brought into that—torture chamber, where the rest of us were, and thought it was all over for you.” Such certainty in his voice, like he’s thought about this a long time. 

He stares up at Jasper’s face and then, after a while, leans down, so that his head is resting on Jasper’s lap. Jasper sets his hand down lightly between Miller’s shoulder blades. He moves his thumb slowly back and forth: all he can bring himself to do. 

“That’s how he knew he had to do it,” Miller says. “Not to save himself, but to save you.” 

* 

Failures of the power storage system and a persistence of clouds blocking the sun have taken their toll: several days of flickerings and outages throughout the ship. In the warehouse room, two lights have gone out completely, while a third picks out a garbled Morse code at the far end of the room. Jasper stands at the end of a long, narrow hall, created by two towering shelving units, crammed with war bounty and junk, and watches it, unsure what to do with his hands. He and Monty taught themselves Morse when they were ten, used it to tap out messages to each other during class, even when their teachers banished them to opposite sides of the room. He'd thought maybe they could use it in lockup too, but they were kept in cells on different sides of the station, so instead he'd craft messages alone in bed at night while Miller slept, messages he knew were going nowhere. Messages he knew would be understood by no one. 

The light reminds him of the ominous electrical warnings in Earth-era horror movies, how it buzzes and winks out, cracks back to life again and sends eerie patterns across the shelves and the floor. Still he'd rather watch the light than examine the shelving units themselves. Some details are better left unknown, he thinks; some inventories don't need to be taken. He'd be fine if they let this storage space grow dusty and unknowable while they busy themselves with shoring up their metal outbuildings and creating uneven stone walkways through the mud. He'd be fine if they locked this place up and forced themselves to forget it was here. He’d be fine. 

Except. Another part of him knows that the paintings are stacked against the far wall, knows too, because he remembers with perfect clarity every lesson he thought was simply wafting from one ear and out the other while he focused on the subtle beauty of her face, that they are the treasures of a civilization, of many civilizations now and in their entirety utterly gone, and that she would want them protected, and that no one else still living wants them protected to the same degree and for the same fierce reasons that he does. That’s why he's here. Not because Miller volunteered them. That got him through the door, but it’s not why he stayed. 

Before the Mount Weather explosion, Jasper watched his people bring truckload upon truckload of ill-gotten gains into the Alpha hangar deck, stack boxes on top of boxes along the wall, watched those boxes disappear and more arrive and yet, he never asked himself where they ultimately went. Now he knows. Into storage. Most of them are unopened, still, and shoved into the spaces between them are random items that must have been grabbed so haphazardly, so thoughtlessly, that they did not even rank placement inside a box, all now starting to gather dust on the newly re-built metal warehouse shelves. So much _stuff_. They stole so much and so quickly, and now they do not even know what they have. 

Doing inventory during a period of brownouts is a particularly thankless task, perhaps an unnecessary task, but the population is restless, and must be kept busy. Most eager for usefulness: the still-new arrivals from Farm, a small group of whom have spread out between the shelves, sorting through boxes of clothes, counting out piece of silverware. He and Miller are the only two non-Farm volunteers. He and Miller and Monty, who is perhaps here because he is Farm, because he is trying to ingratiate himself with Farm again. Jasper catches sight of him standing alone, one shelf over from the flickering light, the hard blue glow of his tablet staining his face, while he writes down the titles of a collection of leatherbound, paper books. These have already been unboxed and stand on the shelf like a miniature library. Only two rows of them, still more books than Jasper has ever seen in one place at one time in his life. 

On the Ark, in the afternoons after class, they'd spend their time in Jasper's room, Jasper reading on his bed and Monty tilted all the way back in Jasper's desk chair, holding the tablet with the day's assignments in front of him with both hands. But the overhead light was still steady then, and the glare of the screen never changed the color of his skin. 

Jasper stands at the far end of the hallway, tucked in against the end of the shelving unit, only barely glancing around the corner, himself unseen. Monty, he's sure, does not notice him. Monty, throwing the rock over the side of the observation deck. Monty, climbing through the makeshift gate in the Arkadian wall, walking with him through the forest stillness. Monty next to him on the reclaimed grass outside the dropship, watching him sleep, unaware that he'd blearily reached consciousness again. Monty in the control room, surveying the battlefield, counting his losses. 

Monty in the depths of Alpha Station, his fingers lingering on the burnt red of one of the book spines, like maybe it's a title he knows. Like maybe he's suddenly remembered what he's doing, what he's touching: treasures barely salvaged from the underground, ill-gotten gains. Ownership passing by the deadly work of his own hands. Just another unintended consequence of what may have felt, at the time, like an act of salvation. 

Jasper's inability to feel like he’s been saved keeps him lingering there in the cool space in the middle of the room, uncertain in the shadows. If he were to walk down the hall and try to start a conversation, how could that conversation possibly go? _I understand now and I miss you? I understand and I'm sorry? I understand and I'm not sorry but I still feel you all the time, twined into every memory, lodged into all the corners of my life?_ His lungs burn. His hands do not feel entirely like his hands, and he shoves them in his pockets, afraid to see them shake. 

In the Mountain, the treasures of humanity were carefully preserved. That was its purpose: a city of safekeeping. In that way, it was not unlike the Ark, where the present acted as nothing but a vessel to the future, and so the descendants of the Ark should understand conservation, the care of what is precious and ancient and unique. Without such care, the books will grow thick with mold, the paintings will crack, the fabric will run threadbare, pockmarked with holes. 

He'd like to see it all wither, not theirs for the keeping. But also, he'd like to see the last remnants of the Mountain survive, all that can still survive: the relics that meant something to her, the relics he touched with his own hands once, awed, still capable of revelation, traveling through new mysteries of the Earth. 

The shelves loom over him, rigid and severe, his footsteps as quiet as he can make them against the metal floor. Small sounds of shifting, of hands pawing through boxes, of boxes sliding against metal, of human movement and conversation, remind him that even when he sees nothing but objects piling up all around him, he isn't alone. He could let his own past mold and fuzz and ferment with bitterness and neglect, but all he'd get for his troubles is a constant bile at the back of his throat and the sense of something voracious and fungal and living, growing, expanding across past and present alike, until he’s no longer sure if he is the force of its creation or only the passive surface upon which it feeds. 

At the end of one aisle: a group of Farm Station boys, passing down boxes from the highest shelves. And halfway down another: Bryan, by himself, carefully taking out and stacking up bedclothes and linens, marking down their number and color and size. He doesn't look up when Jasper passes, which is all for the best. Somehow, just by the presence of his other station members, he's made himself someone who belongs here, Jasper himself still an interloper, less entitled to the artifacts of his own history, a memory of trauma just passing through. The new boyfriend, or something like, about to be caught in the crosshairs of the old boyfriend's stare. 

He'd rather not. 

At the far end of the room, he finds the paintings, stacked up against the wall with minimal care, saved from being smashed against each other only by the thick bulk of their frames. He stares at them a long moment, his mind blank, but pretending he is gathering courage within himself. Really, the feeling is more of gathering energy after a short night's sleep, preparing for a task that is mundane and dull but necessary, like school, feeling no ardor for it but a certain weary resolve to play by the rules for a time. He sets his tablet on a bit of spare space on the shelf behind him. Then he sets himself to shuffling through the canvases, taking his own personal inventory first. 

He'll find hers of course, eventually; he knows it's there. He took it himself, after his one visit back to the Mountain after its fall. Took it and held it carefully against his chest, out into the sun, out to the Rover, the forbidding, empty stare of his eyes enough to deter any questions. Or perhaps it was Octavia, next to him with one hand on his back, who kept everyone else's mouths shut. Back at Arkadia, he considered stashing the painting away in his quarters, then decided against. He'd picked a tiny room in the far corner of the Station, and he knew the painting would dominate that space to a stifling degree. But he spends so much less time there now. He thinks perhaps he'd like to take it back. 

He's temporarily distracted in his search by a striking and distantly familiar portrait of a man in a suit, which brings up deep wells of sadness and confusion in him. Looking at it, he does not notice an approaching footstep, only—a light touch against his back— 

He jumps, shocked by a straight shot of adrenaline. The touch was no more than the slightest pressure, starting to trail down his spine, then abruptly gone. But his heart is hammering against his ribs, bursts of exploding stars at the edges of his vision. He lets the paintings fall back into place. He holds the heel of his palm against his chest to keep his damned racing heart in place. 

"Sorry." Miller's voice, low and apologetic behind him. Jasper turns around, gathering his shaky breaths. "Didn't mean to startle you." 

When Jasper doesn't immediately answer, his gaze still flitting fast across Miller's face and over his shoulder, searching out dangers on instinct in the darkest parts of the room, Miller lets his hands settle on Jasper's hips, tentatively enough to be pushed away. Slowly, from there, he encircles him. Jasper lets himself be pulled closer, lets his eyes briefly close. 

"It's okay," he says, and means it. "I wasn't really working." 

"Me neither." 

Jasper's hands are trapped between their bodies, his fingers curling in the fabric of Miller's shirt. 

"Not like it's obvious where to begin," Miller's saying. "Just starting anywhere seems dumb." 

“Mmm. Yeah, good idea you had, volunteering us to sort through crap.” 

Hiding out beneath the unsteady lights, another one threatening to gutter out just above. Making lists that may go nowhere, sorting through the past, stalling, wasting time. 

Miller quirks up the corner of his mouth, a rueful smile at his own expense. “I’m full of good ideas,” he says, shuffling a half-step forward, until the toe of his boot stubs up against Jasper’s sneaker. He ducks his head, and their foreheads bump together. And Jasper hesitates before he kisses him, not daring to explain to himself why, but still tentative and soft in the moment of meeting. 

* 

What is he supposed to say in the moment that he realizes he owes Monty nothing? He's standing exposed beneath a colorless, numb sky, partially occluded with clouds, nothing but a towel around his waist and his clean feet already dirty again from the insides of his ratty old boots. When the wind picks up, threatening rain, he feels it whip across the last water droplets on his skin and he’s wracked by violent shivers. 

Monty's already behind the shower partition, but he looked up when Jasper called to him, and now he's waiting for a sentiment Jasper can no longer express. All he can think of now is Monty at the dropship, shouting: _Either you pull yourself together and you get on with your life, or you fall apart alone_. 

What he meant, or seemed to mean: _Don't come back until you're better_. 

If at all. 

He was wrong to think that Monty needs an explanation, that he cares to know why Jasper has not tried to bridge the gap between them. But he needs to say something, so he speaks to the Monty of the past, the Monty that's still standing out by the guttering fire at the old camp and waiting for Jasper to be less stubborn, waiting for him to finally give in. So he says, "I'm still in pieces." He tosses the words out across the patch of dirt between them, a life preserver he knows he cannot throw far enough, a futile scattering of syllables. Imagining they are the last two left in Arkadia, and these words are all that still exists between them. 

This Monty, standing so completely still and frowning, in that way that he does, like he's computing instead of thinking, does not appear to understand. 

"I'm still falling apart," Jasper says. Still trying. Trying for the first time in a long time. 

"You're not the only one," Monty shouts back at him, just as Jasper turns around to leave, and he has to smile. As if Monty did not take the greatest pride in the way he always folds himself up into compact and manageable little pieces and then sets himself aside. As if falling apart weren't the last thing Monty Green would ever do. 

Jasper doesn't let himself stop walking until he reaches the Alpha Station door. Then he leans his forehead against the grimy metal of the doorway, listens to the distant splash and spray of the shower turning on, watches out of the corner of his eye the way the shadows spread and merge together across the ground as the clouds above combine and block the sun. 

He walks to his own room, where he takes his time getting dressed. He’s grateful at least that he doesn't have a mirror, so that he cannot take stock of the shadows he knows are darkening beneath his eyes. He pulls on a sweater over his t-shirt and switches out his boots for sneakers. Then he locks his door behind him and walks the length of the ship again, through the cafeteria, which is crowded with off-shift workers seeking out shelter from the coming storm, and then down the hall to Miller's, where he knocks lightly on the door. 

This, he thinks, feels like coming home. 

The door opens only after a long moment, Miller on the other side, looking surprised to see him, though not displeased. "Hey," he says, on an exhale, half-smiling. 

"Hey," Jasper echoes. He takes a step forward. Bouncing, almost nervous, on the balls of his feet, his movements a stutter. Curls his fingers in the front of Miller's shirt and tugs him closer, and leans in, and presses his mouth to Miller's mouth. 

The kiss is slow, deepens slowly, does not break or waver even as Jasper trips over his own feet stepping over the threshold, stepping closer, and Miller, with his eyes closed, shuts the door behind them with a muffled thud. Jasper can feel the sharp, shocked way he breathes in, a knife’s edge inhale. Then the hard press of his hands at Jasper's hips. Because he cannot himself pull away or because he knows that Jasper needs this, he draws Jasper in, mouth opening to mouth, breath syncing to breath. Jasper finds that one of his hands has settled lightly against the side of Miller's face. 

When they break apart at last, only for air, Miller's forehead rests against his forehead, and his hands grab at him as if searching out anchor, and the intake and outtake of his lungs feels as momentous as a shifting of the earth. Jasper's eyes flutter closed. He drags his thumb across the stubble on Miller's cheek. "What was that for?" Miller asks him, ragged, and Jasper gives a very slight, almost imperceptible, shake of his head. 

He leans in for another kiss, shorter this time, an apology, and finally forces himself to pull back. Meeting Miller's gaze, holding it steady, is more difficult than he’d imagined it would be. He feels that he has shown some private and particularly raw bit of himself, though when he tries to gauge the effect of this exposure from the expression on Miller’s face, he finds only confusion, uncertainty, a sense of searching. Perhaps this part of him cannot be easily understood. Perhaps it cannot be fully shared at all. But even if he’s wrong, he's exposed so much more of himself, in so many more words, in the private, hidden moments they've carved out together, the evenings and the nights he used to promise himself were the last. Too late now to worry over revelations. 

"Do you ever feel," he asks, "that you have to try—that you have to put all of your effort into—just being present? Feeling like you’re _here_? That _now_ doesn't even exist unless you concentrate?" 

He scans his eyes across Miller's face, trying to read an answer there before he gives one. All Jasper can find is confusion, and he opens his mouth to try again, still not sure how to put into words this sense that his mind exists distant from his body, that his body continues on, in Arkadia, going through motions, and his mind drifts and wanders, and a film exists over everything, coating the most ordinary of objects and moments and emotions with an unreal glaze. All everyday things seem no more than the trappings of some other life he has abandoned, an unreality all around him or maybe in him. And this is why he'd needed to feel Miller definite and strong and sturdy against him, familiar beneath the palm of his hand. 

"No," Miller answers, steady, after a few moments of thought. He steps back and sits on the edge of his bed, and Jasper wills himself to move and sit next to him, only their knees touching. "I think we have the opposite problem around here." 

This thought, spoken slowly and each word carefully formed, strikes Jasper as one that has been a long time coming, that is only now coalescing in a way that Miller can share. 

"What do you mean?" 

"I mean each day just...exists." He half turns, his knee up on the bed, a slow-simmering urgency building in his voice. "Each day by itself. No one wants to think about the past—" 

_No one but you,_ he might add, because Jasper knows what people say about him, the specific accusations in the rumors that he is _lost_. 

"And the future doesn't exist." 

Jasper reaches out, rests his hand on Miller's knee, gives it a squeeze. "That's pretty morbid of you." Almost a joke. 

Miller doesn’t laugh. "Arkadia is...a state of existence that none of us chose," he says instead, eyes closing for a moment, trying to explain. Jasper's touch softens, and he waits. "No one planned for Alpha Station to land here. No one wants to live behind a wall. Not if they felt they could survive outside it, and there's no agreement if we can. Even when we try to build, or we talk about elections, it's all just part of being on hold. And I try to think back to a time when we weren't on hold, distracted by some temporary goal or just trying to survive, when we were working toward something positive—and I can't." 

"On the Ark, maybe," Jasper answers, distant. He knows it's not the right answer, just a hypothesis he's throwing out there, as if it had to be said. 

"Yeah, a life on Earth for our great-grandkids. I never really gave a shit about that." 

"Me neither." He's almost smiling now, Miller too, wistful for a time when having no purpose, no greater goal, was a luxury in itself, simply a facet of being self-centered and young. When existing in the present was easy, and all that was expected of them. 

"Do you know what I mean?" Miller asks, and Jasper realizes that, without meaning to, without thinking, they are holding hands, and that Miller's grip is strong, so strong that he can feel in his bones. 

"Yeah," he admits. "I do. Just feels like… Everyone's waiting. All the time." 

Waiting for war, perhaps, waiting to be right about war. Waiting to feel safe, not knowing what safety means. Some of them, the hundred, waiting for Clarke to come back, waiting for her like waiting to be haunted by a ghost. And he himself—waiting for whatever is coiled inside him to finally release— 

"So what do you want?" he asks. "What's your vision of the future?" 

Miller takes a deep breath, lets it out in a choked and uneven laugh, suddenly distracted by a surreal and silly thought. "You sound like you're launching my campaign." 

"Sure—Nathan Miller for Chancellor. That's what we need." 

"Shut up." Still laughing, lightly, undoubtedly fond. Jasper wants to lean in again and kiss his cheek, but instead he just twines his fingers through Miller's fingers, urging him on. 

"Just tell me." 

"Okay, okay." 

His smile fades, and his gaze becomes distant, thoughtful, and Jasper imagines again the hold of Miller's arms around him, late at night, warding off the nightmares that hide in all of the dark places he cannot see, the sense that he is safe only in the narrow space at the edge of Miller's bed. Trying to immerse himself in visions of a peaceful, beautiful Earth. This feels the same. Everything that threatens held at bay, and something else, calm and quiet and gaining in strength, unfurling before them with subtle, persistent urgency. 

"I don't want to live on Alpha Station anymore," Miller's saying. "I want to find someplace new, where we don't bother anyone and no one bothers us. Near a lake, so I can learn how to swim and how to catch fish. I want to build my own house and start to farm and get better at hunting. I want to be, you know—" He starts to smile, ducks his head down and Jasper lets the images settle: the little cabin at the edge of the woods, a well-worn dirt path to the lake, Miller chopping firewood in the evening and around him, the deepening darkness punctuated by the glint of fireflies. "Like one of those examples in the Earth Skills books. _Surviving_ , but it doesn't mean war or killing." 

_Living_ , Jasper thinks. _Building a life._

He takes in a breath, slow, shaking, trying to gain time because the question he wants to ask won't resolve into words. 

"And that _us_ ," he manages, at last, "that _where no one bothers us_. Do you mean all of Arkadia or—?" 

_Just you and me?_

"All of Arkadia," Miller answers, but immediately after, seems to hesitate around something else: an exhale, a confession. Jasper hears every minute sound between them, and every facet of the silence. He feels a painful stop in his own throat. "But," Miller adds. Flicks his tongue out across his lips, tilts his head. "But we could have a cabin, just the two of us, together." 

_We could be something that lasts. We could be something that builds upon itself, works to sustain itself, strives for the sun._

Miller's holding his hands so tightly, fingers digging into the skin between Jasper's knuckles, that Jasper can feel a crushing sensation like the scrape of bone on bone. Miller's nerves, thudding, building; how he understands that the fantasy of a little home to themselves was a confession, as it felt to Jasper like a secret only hesitantly shared and at great cost, and all he can think to do is draw Miller's hands up to his lips and kiss his fingers, his knuckles, murmur against his skin, "I'd like that. A cabin together on the edge of the settlement.” He pulls back, just a little. “We could build a boat and go out on the lake." 

At that, Miller drops Jasper’s hands, untangles their fingers, pulls Jasper closer with a hand to the back of his neck. He is smiling, warm. And his kiss feels like a promise that their future is possible, that simply the strength of this undiluted, aching longing might someday make it real. 

* 

"We have to meet the future with optimism," Kane says, his voice booming out to fill the hangar deck, ringing out with such convincing power that, for a moment, Miller truly believes. He believes, at least, that Kane believes. 

“We must be forward-thinking. We must be willing to untether ourselves from what is done and start again.” 

Miller believes that the ground has changed Kane, and that the transformation is complete and sincere. Because he can't imagine the Vice-Chancellor of the Ark being this willing to let the past fall so neatly and easily away. 

He glances over at Jasper, standing next to him in their safe, unobtrusive spot at the far end of the room, his arms crossed tight against his chest. He looks like he's holding himself in. Miller can't read Jasper’s expression in profile, but he feels the tension coiled up in him, slow waves of it seeping out of him at the place where their arms touch. 

"This will not be easy, and I am not here to lie to you or to mislead you," Kane is saying. 

_It's a bad sign_ , Miller thinks, the corner of his mouth tilting up in a grim smile, _when you have to include a disclaimer about the truth._

"And I know that you, all of you, are well-versed in hard work, from the Ark and from our time on the ground. But this is work of a different kind, and difficulty of a different kind. This is the work of _letting go_. This is the work of _trust_. Learning to trust each other, to trust your elected leaders—" 

"To trust you?" Jasper mumbles, low and dull but in the same tone in which, back in the old days, he used to joke, and Miller turns a bitter laugh into a cough. 

The hangar deck is crowded: groups huddled together at the tables, the bar, some people standing along the edges of the room—crowded, but only so much so. The true decline in their numbers is apparent now, as the whole community gathers together all at once, set to the task of shaping what will come. 

At the dropship, no one questioned the leadership chain of command. Bellamy set himself above from the start: older, more powerful, more certain, with his band of young men that Miller was so eager to join, and only Clarke ever challenged him—Clarke and Wells, for the few days he lived. This ceding of responsibility seemed so obvious then, Bellamy’s confidence and certainty first a light through the confusion of homecoming, and then a safety net, Bellamy himself someone they could cling to and depend on, trust with foolhardy assurance, through the worst of their fear. 

And, Miller asks himself, is he afraid, now, still? 

"And most of all, learning to trust," Kane goes on, "in the potential for peace. I am telling you that our opponents desire peace as much as we do. That in this new world of uncertainty we can at least be sure of this: despite our differences, we all want the same thing. A lasting compromise and peace among our communities. A relationship built on trade and cooperation, not on war and destruction. Meeting places in conference rooms and council chambers, not on the battlefield. To achieve this peace, we must be willing to forgive. We cannot cling to the hurt of the past. Memorial and remembrance and respect for the dead need not take the form of self-righteous anger and vengeance. Because vengeance is a cycle from which we may never escape." 

Vengeance is a cycle, of course, one he’s lived in himself, and it is powered by the urgency of survival, and by fear. 

Is he still afraid? What about the rest of them? Is there terror in the room? 

He glances around, at the survivors of Alpha and Mecha and Farm as they watch Kane in silence, hands on their laps or resting on tabletops, arms crossed: a mass of people, of tamped down but roiling energy. 

Bellamy’s sitting at the far edge of the crowd, all but hidden, at a small table by himself. He's got his expression set, narrow and cold, his hand wrapped around and almost engulfing a small tin cup, its contents almost certainly already drained. The last time Miller saw him looking like this was also the last time Arkadia gathered together in the hangar deck, all at once, the day of the Mount Weather memorial. He remembers how Bellamy sat with such tension between his shoulder blades, walked with such shuddering steps, that he seemed as if he would shatter all at once in the moment he tried to speak. That moment feels ages in the past now. Miller sat next to Bryan at the service, made himself into no more than a cipher, a human emotional crutch, the supportive boyfriend who knew nothing of the explosion or the destruction or the eradication of the Mountain, a hollow object for whom the Mountain had meant nothing. 

The other survivors of the bunker, along with most of the rest of the remaining hundred, are sitting all together at a long table near the center of the room. Monroe has a tiny spare gear that she's spinning around on its side, as if by habit, not watching it spin but always catching it before it can clatter loudly on its side. Harper's next to her, still in her uniform, then Octavia, looking surly and ready to fight, and Raven, watching and judging, and on Raven's other side, Monty. Next to Monty are two empty chairs. Miller noticed them when he and Jasper first came in, slipping in late just moments before Kane's speech began, then chose to pretend he had not noticed them. Just like he has not noticed Bryan and the rest of Farm Station sitting at the front, with Pike. 

But he makes the mistake of staring too long at the old dropship crew, so long that Raven happens to look up and notice him in return. She catches his eye and waves him over. He hesitates, looks to Jasper, who is still watching Kane with a pent-up defiance, and then at the two chairs, and at Monty, and at Raven again. She rolls her eyes at him, points at him and then to the chairs. Monty notices the small commotion at last, and Miller’s heart drops down into his gut. But Monty only pulls out the closest chair like an invitation, and then turns his attention back to Kane again, as if Miller’s next move mattered to him not at all. 

Miller elbows Jasper in the ribs, sharp enough to get his attention, and gestures to the two open chairs. What would be worse, he asks himself: if Jasper were to take the seat next to Monty, or leave it for Miller himself? Not for a second does he believe they can simply stay where they are. Limbo, a careful construct, the appearance of eternity, soft and malleable and frail to the touch, is already starting to weaken and fall. 

Jasper shrugs, and in the silence that follows the conclusion of Kane's speech, the shuffling rearrangement at the head of the room as Pike gets to his feet, they walk over to the empty seats. Jasper sits down first next to Monty, and Miller takes the chair at the end. 

"The Chancellor," Pike begins, into a silence now solid and impenetrable as rock—Jasper’s arm shifting, the sleeve of his sweater touching Miller's arm—"talks of peace as if it had no cost. He speaks of respecting our dead, but he wants to sit in council chambers with their killers!" 

No applause to this, but a rumble of feet stomping the metal floor, fists banging the metal tabletops—concentrated around Farm, scraps of noise scattering out through the rest of the room. 

"Only a few weeks ago, we held a memorial for our people, who were killed in an unanticipated attack by a Grounder assassin. Did that assassin want peace?" 

"This is bullshit," Raven mumbles, barely audible beneath the angry noise from the left side of the room, but Miller can't tell if she means Pike's speech, or the whole charade of the speeches, the election, the spectacle of raw power barely controlled. Worse: power no longer held by them, to be used for their own survival, and whatever comes beyond, but by forces above and around them. Power to which they are again expected to submit. 

"I know," Monty answers, next to her. His own voice is dull and angry, and he closes his eyes for a long moment after. In that moment, Jasper watches him in the same way one might watch an unidentified insect, wondering where it will land, wondering if it can sting. 

The speeches _are_ bullshit, true, no more than pure manipulation, but the people are weary and need something to rouse them to their feet. Talk of peace and compromise and willful forgetting will not do. Only promises of revenge without cost, of victory that will taste of copper and rust and yet not turn them ill, can work as alarm bells to shake the most deadened out of sleep. No one wants to hear what Kane has to tell them, itself a certain type of falsehood, about the active victory of jettisoning the past, the simple premise of offering pardons, even to oneself, and moving on. 

So much easier to seek retribution, to pretend that one more loss will even the score, and that the score, once evened, can be neatly put aside. 

Yet this weariness, which he hears in Jasper’s low, uneven sigh, sees in the curve of his shoulders and the distance of his gaze, comes from loss, and Miller cannot stand another, will not be goaded to another. What else can he do? The only source of strength he knows is a vision of a little boat tethered to the edge of a lake. He lets Pike’s words drone on, distant waves crashing on distant and jagged rocks, and reaches for Jasper’s hand under the table. Fingers curl around fingers. Palm presses against palm. This is enough. For a moment, what will come shines subtly brighter than what has been left behind. 

Written December 31, 2018 - May 26, 2019 / Edited June 21 - July 3, 2019 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! You can find me on tumblr @kinetic-elaboration. 
> 
> Moodboard for this fic [here](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/186105776815/next-time-on-millerjasper-s3-au-15k-rated-m-a).


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